


Hell is other band members

by The_Man_With_The_Tattered_Smile



Category: You Know They Got A Hell Of A Band
Genre: It's Your Move, Other, Strange Days (1995) - Freeform, You Know They Got A Hell Of A Band - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 04:37:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19418629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Man_With_The_Tattered_Smile/pseuds/The_Man_With_The_Tattered_Smile
Summary: Rock and Roll Heaven, and the reason it doesn't exist anymore.





	Hell is other band members

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crazyjane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crazyjane/gifts).



**Date: January 1, 2000**   
**Location: Roseburg, Oregon**

The young woman seemed to be more or less aging before their eyes. When she first entered the police station, and asked to report a crime, she'd given her age as 23. Jenkins thought that must have been a pretty hard 23, but like they say, it ain't the years, it's the mileage. He would have picked her for at least five years older when he'd started making the report, a half hour gone. Now he'd go for maybe 40 or so. It was worrying. Abe Jenkins was an elected sheriff, but he also at least tried to be a detective of sorts, and accurately figuring out how old someone was from their appearance was a part of that, even if it was a part most often used in trying to check the IDs of college students.

The woman (Jenkins no longer felt comfortable thinking of her as young) gave her name as Angela Merrick, which came up on the computer as the name of a missing person from 1984. The photo was a high school yearbook photo from five years before that, but there was a resemblance, he guessed. And whatever she'd been up to all this time to make her look so used up, it had been more than 15 years since she went missing, meaning the photo was nearly twenty years older. Perhaps that was why the woman looked more like the mother of the girl in the photo. Even allowing for all that, assuming this girl, or this woman, was 38 or 39, she still looked older. She'd seen some shit, Jenkins figured.

She was wearing what appeared to be a waitress uniform, cut like the ones in the Fifties nostalgia places. It was torn and splashed with mud, which at least lent some credence to the idea that she'd been struggling through the woods all night. But the badge pinned to the dress said her name was Sissy. When Jenkins pointed that out to her, she'd ripped the badge off and thrown it across the room like it was burning her.

"They called me that," she told him.  
"Who?" he'd asked.  
"Them," she said bitterly. "The dead musicians."

What followed was an insane story that couldn't possibly be true, and yet Jenkins would have bet a thousand bucks that Merrick could beat any polygraph. It might not be the truth - it sounded way too weird for it to be possible, let alone true - but she believed it. He could hear the conviction in her voice.

Apparently, somewhere in the wilds between Roseburg and Toketee Falls, there was a small town called, get this, Rock And Roll Heaven, populated mostly be dead rock and roll stars and the few people who wandered in and couldn't leave. Merrick had been traveling across the country with her boyfriend, Clark Sadowski - they were both students at UCLA, but she was from Minneapolis and he was from Chicago, and they were on their way back to see their respective parents over the Fourth of July weekend - when they'd blundered into Rock And Roll Heaven. The Mayor - Elvis Presley, of course - and the chief of police - Otis Redding - had explained that they couldn't leave, and helped them find jobs. She'd been made to become a diner waitress, and he'd been given a job in the lumber mill. After a week, they'd made a break for it. Otis had rounded up a posse, and they'd chased them until Clark missed a curve and ran off the road. They'd dragged them both from the car, and the posse - John Belushi, Jim Morrison, Keith Moon and John Bonham - had beaten Clark to death. Merrick paused after that bit, and Jenkins had the impression there was something else there, something she wasn't saying, but he didn't want to ask. She was clearly having a hard enough time keeping it together, and he didn't want to push her too hard. There'd be therapists for that later on.

She'd gone back to the diner and kept her heard down after that. Occasionally, she'd tried to warn off other people who strayed into the town - once or twice, even successfully done so - but she was too afraid to try to get out again herself. He asked her about her age, and she told him that time worked differently in Rock And Roll Heaven. There was a concert every night, but sometimes the concerts lasted for months or years. The dead didn't get tired, it seemed. And while the music was going on, no one got any older, whether they were alive or dead.

But somehow, they knew about the outside world a little. They always knew when a new arrival was expected - sometimes just by a hour or two, sometimes by days, depending on how far away from Rock And Roll Heaven's little corner of Oregon they died. Someone who died in Africa or Europe might take a few days, someone who died in LA or Seattle would be there before you could finish playing their most recent album through. And everyone came. Everyone. If a backing vocalist died in a car crash, she'd find her way to Rock And Roll Heaven as readily as a member of the Beatles would.

That was when things started to change. Not long after Merrick first got to town, there'd been a rumour that an entire band was going to show up, something that hadn't happened since half of Skynyrd turned up all at once nearly a decade back. The new arrivals were a four piece heavy metal outfit from Van Nuys called the Dregs of Humanity, who hadn't even recorded so much as a single yet, but were apparently killer live and had got a cover story on the Rolling Stone.

They never came.

Roy Orbison did. Stevie Ray Vaughan did. Freddie Mercury, Kurt Cobain, Cab Calloway, all of them showed up. But not the Dregs. They never appeared. It cast some doubt on the infallibility of the Mayor and his people. There were more escape attempts - she thought that some of them might have succeeded (although it was equally possible that they'd just been killed, like Clark had).

Things started to change, and Rock And Roll Heaven did not care for change. Not at all.

But it happened anyway, both because of those who didn't show up - Richey Edwards also failed to arrive - and those who did, like Tupac and Biggie.

Those two might not have liked each that much when they were alive, but they found common cause when dead. They didn't care for the overwhelmingly white power structure in town, or the Uncle Toms who worked with it. And they were not about to let the man keep them down in Rock And Roll Heaven.

The second death of Freddie Mercury happened not long after. Tupac called it an execution for Mercury's crimes against the black man, meaning the time Queen had played Sun City in South Africa. But no one much cared about the reason. They care that, apparently, dead musicians could kill other dead musicians. For real this time.

Things grew ever more tense in Rock And Roll Heaven, but the Mayor and the cops were able to keep a lid on most of it, and there were only a couple of deaths. Still, the town was a powder keg, ready to blow.

And on New Year's Eve, 1999, whatever powers brought dead rock stars to the town threw a lit match named Jeriko One on that keg, and ran like hell to get away. Tupac and Biggie had been murdered, so far as they knew, by other black men. Jeriko (and his drummer, Replay) had been murdered by white men. White cops. If Tupac and Biggie were hot under their collars, Jeriko One was incandescent. Within hours of his arrival, he'd shot Otis Redding whole Redding played at that night's concert. And he'd kept shooting, and others had taken his side, while still others were shooting back at him. The crowd disintegrated into chaos, and Merrick realized that this was it. This was the end. And she ran.

Hours later, she'd staggered into the main street of Roseburg, nine hours into the new millennium, and found the police station. She'd told them, as best she could, where Rock And Roll Heaven was, and he'd sent a deputy to try to find it, even though it appeared on no maps, even though it appeared in none of the aerial photography that had been done a few years back by the state, even though he'd lived here his entire life and never heard of it.

Jenkins looked up from the pad he'd been making notes in. It was a hell of a story, and damned if he didn't almost believe it himself. Damned if he didn't want to believe it. He stared at the woman opposite him, lost for words.

He'd probably have still been sitting there, still silent, if Merrick's parents hadn't arrived - he'd had a deputy call them earlier, when Merrick's ID came back - and jolted him out of his woolgathering. There were tears and hugs and smiles, and Jenkins told Merrick she was free to go, since she hadn't committed any crimes.

He watched through his office windows as her parents led her to their Oldsmobile, and they all got in. Her dad started the engine, and Jenkins caught just a snatch of something on the radio, before Merrick tearfully begged him to turn it off. It took him a while, but he finally figured out where he knew the song from - from when his daughter and her friends loved it back when they were seniors in high school, and they'd all sworn up and down that this band, Curve, would be the next Queen, the next Zeppelin, the next Beatles.

The song, he remembered with a chill, was called "No Escape From Heaven".


End file.
